2013-2014 Exhibitions

September 27 – November 27, 2013

Leech Gallery: Capturing Modernity: Art, Fashion, and ArtificeCurated by Elizabeth Carlson, Associate Professor of Art HistoryA look at the connections between turn of the century fashion and burgeoning modernity.

Hoffmaster Gallery: Alison Stehlik: Where-HouseWhere-House explores the relationship between the architectural space that is a home, and the products and possessions that fill that space. Packaging crowds the visual backdrop of our day-to-day routine. It sits on our tabletops, it fills our cupboards, it occupies our purses and our luggage; an assortment of products and brands color the visual landscape of our homes. Meanwhile the actual structures that we live in become more and more derivative, as homes are produced ‘factory style’ in subdivisions and planned communities. As our homes, and the things within our homes become more and more alike, I wonder if we are losing our connection to the place where we live in favor of the space that we live in.

Kohler Gallery: Stephanie J. Williams: HomegrownWashington D.C. based artist Stephanie Williams is interested in the process of reconstitution in which mundane experiences and scenes form potential oddity. The Anomaly Portrait series, sculpture and installation examines themes of body topography, play, home, and pose. The work tends to amalgamate the senses of the human form, taking something familiar and reconfiguring it into alien territory. Through a changed context, these disparate parts become fetish or exotic object allowing you to look at what is uncomfortable to see, to tie a cute bow around something grotesque and to have accessibility to anomaly. These works collect gaps in understanding and reorient in order to create myth. They extend a hand that provides context in which our bodies experience and understand the world around us.

Leslie Smith III is an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. " My studio practice is concentrated around visual abstraction as a method for communicating stories about everyday human situations involving various types of power relationships. I make both small and large narrative abstract paintings in addition to works on papers." -Leslie Smith III

Kohler Gallery: Sandra Dyas: my eyes are not shutSandra Dyas is a visual artist and a Lecturer in the Art Department at Cornell College. She received her MFA in Intermedia at the University of Iowa in 1998.

"Drawn to people and environments and especially light, my camera is a way of recording life as I see it. I strive to create a collaborative and authentic portrait of the ever-changing, strange and beautiful world we live in. This book is a collection of people, places and things I want to hold on to and remember."

July 30 – August 17

The Wriston Summer Exhibition Series is an annual summer exhibition in the Wriston Art Center Galleries intended to engage the Fox Valley community in a conversation about artworks and artists of the Midwest.

For the inaugural exhibition in the series, the Galleries will feature the work of Thomas M. Dietrich, Artist-in-Residence at Lawrence University from 1944 to 1974, and his wife, artist Margaret Rappe Dietrich, LU Class of 1936. In addition to paintings and drawings on loan from local collections, the exhibition will help visitors explore and appreciate even more of the Dietrich's artworks around the Fox Valley.